Inside The Mind of a Productivity Master

What PARA is and how you can use it to organize yourself

• Tiago Forte is the founder of Forte Labs and the creator of courses on knowledge management, productivity, writing, and cognitive extension.

• His system should be designed to help you produce more, and anything else is a waste of time

• Actionability

• He takes something that everyone who's interested in productivity spends endless amounts of time doing, organizing knowledge, and he's managed to cut through it with a simple idea: Actionability

Background

• Forte Labs is an online education company focused on transforming people's productivity

• The idea is to take people to a completely new level in what they are able to handle, what they’re able to execute, and ultimately what they will be able to produce in the world

Actionability

• Producing results and taking action is crucial to Tiago’s organizing philosophy

• Organizing so you can take action is what his systems are designed to do

• Create a system that allows you to organize so that you can effectively take action

Organizing for actionability: PARA

• Projects, Areas, Resources, Archives

• Can fit any file or note on your computer into one of these four categories

• The way it's setup is to organize on a scale of actionability, with Projects being the most actionable, Areas being the least, and Archives the least

How his Evernote is organized

• It is organized according to PARA.

Tiago explains PARA in detail

• Projects is the most important category in PARA

• Each project gets its own dedicated notebook with an emoji attached to indicate it is special

• Resources - notes related to ongoing interest

• Areas - things like Family, Health, Finances, Cooking

Use Readwise to collect book highlights inside of Evernote

• Reading highlights are the gateway drug to productivity

• For books, use the Kindle app which has a built in highlighting feature

• Instapaper for long blog posts and articles

• Liner for any other kind of web page

Use progressive summarization to surface key pieces of insight

• Every time you look through a note, use formatting to surface the key ideas that pop out to you

• Bold the best parts you find and re-visit them later

• If anything bold seems especially important, highlight it

Tool to surface random notes whenever he opens a new browser tab

• RandomNote is a free tool that surfaces random notes from Evernote

• Helps you find things you didn’t even know you were searching for

• Digital note-taking is about increasing serendipity and creativity

How he figures out where to put a note when it could go in multiple places

• Once you have notes, you tend to attempt to create a perfect categorization scheme for where they should go.

• The solution to this problem is to put the note in the first place it's going to be used.

He organizes so he has the information he needs, when he needs it

• Triaging

• Best time to review information is right as close to the problem as you can

• Right when the need arises

• This makes it easy to figure out what's important and where everything should go

How Tiago sets goals

• Goals are super important

• Look for how you can create value now

• Build up and accumulate assets to create products in the future

• Divide goals into short, medium, and long-term goals and make them specific, precise, and actionable

Weekly, Monthly, and Quarterly Reviews to Make Sure That You're on Track

• As you get better, more and more rules become contingent.

• They become optional, they become only as needed. As you develop skill and confidence, you actually need fewer rules. You need less structure.

Organizing his calendar

• Focus Days

Keep your todo list in Things

• Generate a to-do list during your weekly review

What he does about to-dos that hang around

• Don’t allow yourself to feel guilt about it

• Think of them as options

• Reduce scope

• Make them more specific

• Ask yourself, “Why are they still here?”

• Break it down

What he does when he falls off his system

• Weekly review is key to getting back on

• Can take more four-day periods off

• Go on more vacations

• Write retreats

• All these creative heavy lifts become easier because you know you can come back to sanity in a very short amount of time

Too many of his students are concerned with building the perfect system

• Knowledge, I think, is highly informal. It's fluid. It is very context dependent, so it doesn't make sense to spend time on all of that.

• It's really like just doing barely enough to get it through those stages of capturing, organizing, distilling so then you can start expressing.

How he comes up with his productivity systems

• His best insights come from watching how people naturally work and then adding a little bit of structure and formality.

• Informality is a superpower. People have this innate genius, and this is why he has such a deep respect for informality.

A book recommendation: The Body Keeps the Score

• All of our problems with attention, learning, and focus can be traced back to trauma

• A fundamentally new approach to trauma that will start to infect all aspects of self-development and self-improvement fields